Marvel's New. . . I mean Marvel NOW!

Comic book fans have certainly seen the recent news coming out about Marvel Now. It’s Marvels way to refresh, re-imagine, and reinvigorate their titles without doing a line wide reboot like DC did last year. Really though if they’re going to do this why not just go all the way and reboot everything? It worked really well for DC their numbers have been up all year. I’m a Marvel fan, out of the books I buy each week probably 75-90 percent are Marvel with the remainder split between DC and several other publishers. I read these books because they’re interesting to me, if Superman was interesting I would probably read his books but he’s not so I don’t. But do you know what I did when the New 52 started, I picked up a ton of DC books for a few months, titles I wouldn’t usually have read and a few of them I ended up keeping like Green Lantern. Marvel is just changing titles and line-ups and restarting a few books at number one.

Marvel is dropping Secret Avengers in place of Uncanny Avengers, which actually sounds interesting. After Avengers Vs. X-Men ends there is going to be some kind of truce that puts these two teams together, for more than just a one off team up. Uncanny Avengers is going to have the support of two different groups. You’re going to see Avengers mingled with X-Men going on crazy missions together and I’m alright with that. But another book they’re doing is All New X-Men which will be bringing the original 5 X-Men to present times. It’s going to just be several issues of culture shock as they see what the world, and their future selves have become. One thing about the book that will have fans happy, for a bit anyway is Jean Grey will be back kinda.

Everything else seems to be your traditional changing of the guard. Creative teams are finishing up their runs, and moving onto other books. Jonathan Hickman is wrapping up his FF and Fantastic Four stories and will be moving over to Avengers and New Avengers. Brian Michael Bendis will be leaving the Avenger titles to do All New X-Men, and knowing him 8 other new books. A lot of that stuff has been known for a while though, we knew runs were coming to an end and someone else would take over. What we didn’t know was Marvel, to an extent, let their creators pick what books they really wanted to do and went from there. The downside to me is a lot of these titles are going to be getting new number 1’s. Marvel does this a lot. In 2010 with the Heroic Age they restarted all the Avengers books. Invincible Iron Man started back at number 1 with Matt Fractions run, then jumped back up to 500 when that milestone crept up. I started this article out saying that if they’re going to do something, do it all the way, reboot everything. Marvel is doing the opposite, if the book doesn’t tie directly into the Marvel NOW experience it’s being left alone. What does this mean for us? Well as of now books like Iron Man, Avengers, Thor, Captain America and the new titles I mentioned earlier are all started back at 1. Books like Daredevil, Punisher, and Spider-Man are probably just going to be left alone. I don’t want Marvel to throw away all of their continuity but I would like them to either start everything over at 1, or leave it alone. I don’t need a new number 1 every couple years. It makes organizing my comics a pain in the ass and I’m sure that many of you have this problem.

For what it is, this Marvel NOW thing sounds interesting. I like what I’ve read so far, but as you’ve seen I have my concerns and complaints about it. We should be getting more information next week at San Diego Comic-Con, otherwise we’ll have to wait until October when these books start hitting shelves. There is a great piece over on CBR where they talk to Axel Alonso and Tom Brevoort about all this stuff. And make sure to keep an eye here for more information as it becomes available.

With that said, let us know your thoughts on Marvel NOW in the comments below!

Chris talks a bunch on PodQuest each week. He's also been known to write about stuff from time to time. You can Email Chris or follow Chris on Twitter @Just_Cobb or Facebook

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